Women and the
Making of Joyce's Ulysses

March 4, 2022 – July 17, 2022

James Joyce's Ulysses, considered a landmark work of literary modernism, was first published on February 2, 1922. This exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center, curated by Clare Hutton of Loughborough University, marks the 100th anniversary of the book's publication and investigates the important and largely unacknowledged role of women in realization of his famed masterpiece.

Objects from the Ransom Center's James Joyce Collection tell the story of the formative role of his family members and, in particular, of four women—Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Sylvia Beach, who were associated with innovative literary experimentation of the period—all of whom helped Joyce's novel gain widespread notoriety and success.

In the United States, Joyce's novel was a source of controversy and the subject of an obscenity trial in 1921. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's serial publication of Ulysses in their American magazine The Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920 led to seizure of the edition by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. This led to legal proceedings and the obscenity conviction handed down before Joyce had even completed the work.

In the United Kingdom, Harriet Shaw Weaver committed to substantial, and initially anonymous, financial support of Joyce, and published excerpts of Ulysses in The Egoist. Within days of arriving to live in Paris in July 1920, Joyce had enlisted the help of yet another tireless female helper. Sylvia Beach played a pivotal role in bringing the full novel to print under the imprint of her bookshop and lending library Shakespeare and Company, and helped the novel reach a broad audience in print.

See more than 150 rare objects that tell this story, including a first edition of Ulysses, page proofs for its first printing, original copies of The Little Review, manuscripts in Joyce's hand, rare books, printed ephemera, and photographs.

About the Exhibition Curator

Dr. Clare Hutton is Reader in English and Digital Humanities at Loughborough University. Her monograph, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (OUP, 2019) has just been reissued in paperback. Her other research includes editing The Irish Book in English, 1891-2000 (OUP, 2011), and many essays on Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Literary Revival. Learn more